'Frantz Fanon': The Doctor Prescribed Violence

September 2,
2001

'Frantz Fanon': The Doctor Prescribed
Violence

By ADAM SHATZ

hen the third world was the great hope of the
international left -- three very long decades ago, in other words --
no book had a more seductive mystique than ''The Wretched of the
Earth.'' Its author, Frantz Fanon, was a psychiatrist, originally
from Martinique, who had become a spokesman for the Algerian
revolution against French colonialism. He was black, dashing and,
even better, a martyr -- succumbing to leukemia at the age of 36, a
year before Algeria's independence in 1962. Fanon was hardly alone
in championing the violent overthrow of colonialism. But his flair
for incendiary rhetoric was unmatched.

If ''The Wretched of the Earth'' was not ''the handbook for the
black revolution,'' as its publisher boasted, it was certainly a
sourcebook of revolutionary slogans. (Eldridge Cleaver once said
that ''every brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon.'') ''Violence,''
Fanon argued most famously, ''is a cleansing force. It frees the
native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and
inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.''
This was mau-mauing with Left Bank panache. Not to be upstaged,
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his preface, ''To shoot down a European is
to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the
man he oppresses at the same time.''

Fanon's apocalyptic aphorisms have not aged well, least of all in
the third world. And yet he cannot be written off so easily. His
1952 book, ''Black Skin, White Masks,'' offers a penetrating
analysis of racism and of the ways in which it is internalized by
its victims. While his faith in the therapeutic value of violence is
now hard to fathom, much of what he wrote was eerily prescient.
Unlike some of his peers on the left, Fanon was acutely aware that
African leaders were more than capable of oppressing their own
people. His essay on the struggle between native (''an oppressed
person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor'') and
settler (''an exhibitionist'' who ''pits brute force against the
weight of numbers'') will teach you more about the forces clashing
in the Middle East today than a year's worth of editorials.

David Macey has written a prodigiously researched, absorbing book
about the mind and the passion of a 20th-century revolutionary.
''Frantz Fanon'' is the first comprehensive biography in three
decades; it is also the best, the most intellectually rigorous and
the most judicious. A biographer of Michel Foucault, Macey takes
Fanon seriously as a thinker, and though the inner life of his
subject eludes him, he has captured the public figure in all its
nobility and confusion. Macey's Fanon is far more than the ''apostle
of violence'' of Black Panther iconography. Still less does he
resemble the ''postcolonial Fanon'' of literary criticism, a
fashionably melancholy exile who, as Macey writes, ''worries about
identity politics, and often about his own sexual identity.'' Fanon
was brave but also reckless, prophetic but often dangerously
wrongheaded. When he began writing, his weapon was truth; when he
embraced revolutionary violence, truth became a casualty of his
decision.

It is often forgotten that Fanon's profession was not writing or
revolution but psychiatry. The force of his writings lay in their
arresting insights into the disquieting dream life of colonial
society. A volunteer with the Free French in World War II -- he was
awarded a Croix de Guerre after sustaining a serious shrapnel wound
in the chest -- Fanon studied psychiatry on a scholarship in Lyon,
and married a white Frenchwoman barely out of high school.
Embittered by his experience in the French Army, where Africans and
Arabs answered to white superiors and West Indians occupied an
ambiguous middle ground, he gravitated to radical politics, Sartrean
existentialism and the philosophy of black consciousness known as
negritude. Fanon also fell under the influence of Franois
Tosquelles, an innovative practitioner of group therapy. Applying
Tosquelles's methods at a hospital in a suburb of Algiers, where
Fanon arrived in 1953, he earned the trust of Arab patients whom
French psychiatrists had treated with a mixture of pity and
contempt. In Fanon's new home, Macey reminds us, one million
Europeans ruled over some nine million Arabs and Berbers, largely
illiterate and cruelly exploited. After the Algerian National
Liberation Front (F.L.N.) launched an insurrection in 1954, the
French Army used Gestapo tactics to restore order. Suspects were
given electric shocks to the testicles, raped with bottles and often
beaten to death. Entire villages were destroyed in retaliation for
the death of a single soldier. While secretly aiding the rebels,
Fanon cared for victims and perpetrators alike, producing case notes
that shed invaluable light on the psychic traumas of colonial war.

Like his contemporary Che Guevara, Fanon was drawn into a career
as a revolutionary in a foreign land by his work as a doctor. Having
borne witness to the unspeakable suffering inflicted by the French
Army, he came to believe that the revolution contained the seeds of
redemption, not only for Algeria but for the entire colonial world.
As Macey makes clear, however, he was not always a reliable guide to
Algerian realities. His conviction, for instance, that ''the
peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and
everything to gain,'' was a fantasy; they could scarcely play such a
role since French troops had herded them en masse into relocation
centers. In his famous essay on the revolutionary awakening of
Algerian women, Fanon declared that the ''destruction of
colonization is the birth of a new woman.'' Not for the last time,
as Macey notes, Fanon ''mistook temporary changes born of
extraordinary circumstances for a permanent revolution.'' A West
Indian atheist in an Islamic nationalist movement, he saw what he
wanted to see.

Expelled from Algeria in 1956, Fanon moved to Tunis, the F.L.N.'s
headquarters in exile. While working for El Moudjahid, the rebel
newspaper, he founded Africa's first psychiatric clinic, wrote
several influential books on decolonization and traveled throughout
Africa as a spokesman for the revolution. It was a treacherous
atmosphere, rife with conspiracy and intrigue, and it did not help
that Fanon was neither Algerian nor Muslim. In 1957, he found
himself on the losing side of a factional battle when his friend
Abane Ramdane -- a charismatic hard-liner whose growing influence
was resented by the forces in Tunis -- was strangled by his
comrades.

Fanon, Macey notes, ''said nothing,'' perhaps because he knew
that his own name ''was on the list of those who were to be
eliminated in the event of a violent reaction to Abane's
liquidation.'' (In Rome, Fanon told Simone de Beauvoir that Abane's
death haunted his conscience.) Macey raises even more troubling
questions in connection with Fanon's knowledge of a massacre in 1957
in which the F.L.N. slaughtered 300 suspected supporters of a rival
rebel group. At a press conference in Tunis, Fanon blamed the French
for the massacre. Did he know the truth? The more telling question
is whether it would have mattered to him. Truth, he wrote, ''is that
which hurries on the breakup of the colonialist regime. . . . In
this colonialist context there is no truthful behavior: and the good
is quite simply that which is evil for 'them.' ''

One has the tragic sense, reading ''Frantz Fanon,'' of an
intellectual determined to prove himself among men with guns. Like
most intellectual advocates of violence, Fanon preferred to
contemplate it at a distance. When he was in medical school, ''even
basic dissection made him feel nauseated.'' As a revolutionary and
as a writer he strove to overcome his ''weaknesses'' and to make
himself hard.

In 1960, after a 1,200-mile expedition from Mali to the Algerian
border in which he gathered intelligence on French troop movements,
Fanon returned to Tunis, desperately sick. Through delicate
diplomacy involving the C.I.A., he ultimately wound up in an
American hospital. In his final months, his ideas assumed an even
more messianic hue. A ''new man,'' he claimed, was rising from the
ashes of empire in Algeria. Yet in his more sober moments, he
acknowledged that the Algerian soul could hardly be healed
overnight. ''A whole generation of Algerians, steeped in wanton,
generalized homicide with all the psychoaffective consequences that
this entails, will be the human legacy of France in Algeria,'' he
predicted; it was an accurate diagnosis. In Algeria, as in most of
Africa, independence was no sooner achieved than it was confiscated
by generals, bureaucrats and economic elites. Although Fanon remains
indispensable for his writings on race and colonialism, his utopian
program for the third world has gone the way of the colonial empires
whose doom he foretold.

Adam Shatz has contributed to The New York Times, The Nation and
The American Prospect.